geonaut

+1 this is discussed in the Andrew Hodges Turing biography (and no doubt many other books)

I don’t find anything offensive about carefully considering how to do good, or taking a longer term view of humanity.

I think the thing that is irritating about EA is that it often feels like this generation’s ‘post-colonial guilt’. Many people with the privilege to act on their EA sentiments are the beneficiaries of financial inequality, either via inheritance or VC froth, and can afford to absorb the risks.

To be honest, EA feels like church without the beardy cloud man, and IMO is a better use of the philosophy brain-trust than metaphysics, so I have no desire to see it fail. The cultish part is more a Silicon Valley thing than an EA thing.

As an atheist parent being forced consider Catholic faith schools out of sheer necessity, this is far from a help. This is geographical blackmail. I have seen teaching material, and it is subtly biased towards Catholicism. Spending valuable contact hours on Religious Education is a waste of time. I will respect my child’s choice if they find religion as an adolescent/adult, but I do not respect an organisation that depends on indoctrinating 5 year olds and filter-feeding on the local inhabitants.

Western militaries have justice systems, including courts and prisons. I presume they also follow best practice in lots of domains, despite some legal exemptions. They also clearly have the aim to preserve society in a safe state.

Even if militaries are outside the remit of these new AI orgs, they could still be useful in the civilian world.

I’ve tried and failed to read it twice - I just find the dialogue and characters so cringeworthy. Nice world building tho.

Agree that AI is at a different stage of development and has a different risk profile, but my idea would be to learn from those 100+ years of nuclear power management (successes and failures) and bootstrap a similar set of organisations for AI.

I don’t see anything in your reasons that would fundamentally preclude such a setup. I guess that’s really my question - is there a gotcha for AI development that requires a completely new regulatory solution?

Agree progress is rapid, but I was under the impression model training for LLMs was still the preserve of mega-corps, with the support of eg NVDA providing the hardware.

Military may be doing the same behind closed doors of course, but still a large endeavour.

Are you suggesting it is too late for regulation?

“ExxonMobil… [acquired]… a smaller Texas oil and gas company with the U.S.’s largest network of pipelines designed to carry carbon dioxide.”

There was a great episode of the Volts podcast, about a startup aiming to make synthetic shipping fuel (methanol), where waste CO2 was one of the main inputs.

Some good discussion of where they sourced their CO2, and the practicalities of CO2 distribution.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/volts/id1548554104?i=1...

Any optimisations you can make? Will have the advantage of saving you money across all platforms/regions